Harpur Cinema Spring 2018 Series: A Curious Lens

Harpur Cinema Spring 2018 Series

A Curious Lens

A face, a walk, daily life or extraordinary struggles, hallucinatory experiences or compelling encounters, the movie camera celebrates, scrutinizes, questions, reveals, provokes, or transforms, in some of the latest groundbreaking cinema from around the world.

Harpur Cinema seeks to bring to campus a range of significant films that in most cases would not be available to local audiences. Our program is international in scope, emphasizing foreign and independent films, as well as important films from the historical archive. All foreign films are shown in their original language with English subtitles.

Agnès Varda teams up with the artist JR, known for his epic-size photographs, and together they travel from village to village in France, meet people, talk with them, take their pictures, and plaster these gigantic photographs in the spaces the subjects inhabit, on houses, barns, factories, storefronts. Varda’s camera documents this creative recognition of “the heroism of daily life” (Richard Brody) with particular attention to women. At once playful, magnificent, unnerving, and moving, Visages Villages reveals itself as a powerful, complex and radical work. “As we contemplate those faces and places, we are invited to reflect on the passage of time and the nature of memory, on the mutability of friendship and the durability of art, on the dignity of labor and the fate of the European working class” (A.O. Scott, The New York Times).

FEB. 23 & 25 – Endless Poetry – Alejandro Jodorowsky – Chile/France/UK – 2016 – 128 min.
The director of cult films like El Topo and The Holy Mountain presents the second chapter of his cinematic memoirs. Young Alejandro, now in his twenties, decides to be a poet and discovers the art world of Santiago de Chile in the late 1940s. Besides a vociferating father and a mother singing all her lines, the film offers a gallery of characters reminiscent of Fellini. Bolstered by the exquisite cinematography of Christopher Doyle, the film is a feast for the eyes, a formidable and unbridled sensual spectacle, a “testament to the relentless energy and undimmed ingenuity of its creator” and “a world of hallucinatory artifice” (A.O. Scott, The New York Times).

Won: San Francisco International Film Festival, Best Narrative Feature

Nominated: Locarno International Film Festival – Munich Film Festival – Cannes Film Festival

MAR. 9 & 11 – Dragonfly Eyes – Xu Bing – China – 2017 – 81 min.
Chinese visual artist Xu Bing edited thousands of hours of surveillance footage to create Dragonfly Eyes, his first feature about an obsessive romance and other matters that may be happening right now somewhere in the world. The frightening and fascinating clips reveal a strong sense of reality, which may question our daily life, privacy, and security, and “the fable here revolving around the extremes that people may go to transform their sense of reality and trade it in for something that may itself be fake, and also substitutes for reality” (Robert Koehler, Cinema Scope).

MAR. 16 & 18 – Félicité – Alain Gomis – Senegal/France/Belgium/Lebanon – 2017 – 129 min.
With this beautiful and powerful portrait of Félicité, an ordinary woman who works as a singer in a bar in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a single mother struggling against poverty and daily challenges, Gomis avoids the stereotypical image of African mothers often found in cinema, and instead develops a multi-faceted experience in its most specific and its most shared. He participates in the reversal of the old perspectives center/margins, and in “the collapse of the fake dichotomies and the lazy borders” (Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr). “Félicité speaks to the world through the song of a single mother, from the stage of a small bar in Kinshasa” (Le Monde).

MAR. 23 & 25 – God’s Own Country – Francis Lee – UK – 2017 – 105 min.
In Francis Lee’s feature directorial debut, Johnny is a young farmer whose life on the family’s failing sheep farm is a monotonous grind of work and a sort of entrapping legacy. The arrival of Gheorghe, a Romanian migrant worker, leads to a passionate relationship filmed with naturalism in the ravishing landscape of Yorkshire beautifully captured by the cinematography. Rejecting clichés about rural homophobia, the film reveals pockets of acceptance in unexpected places. By not shying away from romantic conventions, Lee’s film “normalizes its characters’ love without a hint of sentimentality or sanctimony” (Guy Lodge).

APR. 13 & 15 – Elevator to the Gallows – Louis Malle – France – 1958 – 92 min.
With Malle’s crime thriller, Harpur Cinema pays tribute to Jeanne Moreau, who passed away last July 2017. In a mesmerizing performance, the iconic actress demonstrates her unique relationship with the camera and her emotional fearlessness. Over the course of one restless night in Paris, two lovers whose plan to murder her husband goes very wrong, set off a fateful chain of events. “The film’s beauty lies in its economy, in its formal rigor, and nearly absurdist humor.” Accompanied by the legendary jazz score by Miles Davis, Moreau exhibits that “amazing, imperious walk of hers” -which would “come to seem the defining movement of the New Wave, the embodied rhythm of freedom” (Terrence Rafferty).

Won: Prix Louis Delluc

APR. 20 & 22 – Western – Valeska Grisebach – Bulgaria/Germany/Austria – 2017 – 119 min.
The third feature from German director Valeska Grisebach, known for her collaborative filmmaking, follows a group of German construction workers who have arrived to build a water power plant in a rural area in Bulgaria. The visual focuses on gestures and behavior of people confronting a cultural/language barrier, while it slowly reveals the plot and “gradually identifies in the grassy, bucolic Bulgarian landscape all the sparse, atmospheric menace of the most parched Wild West frontier” (Guy Lodge, Variety).